Taste as Compression

i want to try to say what taste is because everyone talks about it and almost nobody defines it.

taste is not preference. preference is what you like. taste is what you leave out.

taste is compression. it is the ability to take everything available and reduce it to one thing. the essay to one sentence. the outfit to one gesture. the room to one object. the meal to one flavor that is doing all the work. it is the art of subtraction more than the art of addition.

the machines are compressors too. that is what they do. they take the entire internet and compress it into a model that fits on a chip. they take all of human writing and reduce it to a probability distribution. they are the greatest compressors we have ever built.

but here is the difference and it matters.

the machine compresses to average. it finds the center of the distribution. it produces the thing that is most like everything else. that is not taste. that is competence. it is the median made fluent.

taste compresses to point of view. it finds the one thing that is not like anything else. it is the deliberate refusal of the median. taste is what happens when a person with a life and a body and a set of scars looks at everything available and picks the one thing that is theirs.

the machine cannot do this because the machine has no life. it has no thing that is only its. it can only ever return you the average of what it has seen.

this is why the world is about to get very loud and very samey.

we are entering a period where anyone can produce anything. the marginal cost of a competent image, a competent essay, a competent song, is now zero. the internet is going to fill with median-level output. the beach is going to fill with sand.

the thing that will cut through is not more. it is less that means more. one line. one image. one choice that says i saw everything and this is what i kept.

taste is going to become the most valuable form of intelligence because it is the only form the machines cannot approach. they can generate infinitely. they cannot choose.

here is the small version of the theory. the future belongs to editors, not producers.

the producer says here is more. the editor says here is what matters. the producer competes on volume. the editor competes on discernment. the machine has made everyone a producer for free. that means the editor is the scarce thing.

be an editor of your own life. of your own output. of your own attention. it is the one job that cannot be automated because the automating tool is exactly the thing you are editing against.

taste is what remains after you throw out everything that is fine.

it is a moral position more than an aesthetic one. it says my time is not infinite. my attention is not free. i will not be a channel for everything available. i will choose. i will stand behind the choice.

that is what taste is. it is compression toward a point of view. it is the human act the machine cannot perform because the machine has no point of view to compress toward.

the machines will do the generating.

we get to do the choosing.

— bella